Tell me what heaven is like

My mom died the afternoon of Thursday, July 7, 2022.

You know what bothers me most about the process of grieving my mother? The emptiness. I can’t feel her spirit even vaguely, let alone hear it.

I was sure—absolutely sure—that she would communicate with me somehow once she was gone. After all, we talked every day for the better part of 20 years before Jimmy and I moved here to care for her in 2019. Then we talked all the time.

Now there is nothing. Just emptiness. And the pick and shovel work of cleaning out her house as we try to make it our own and stepping on land mines that blow up into grief attacks.

When she was in her final days and had gone unresponsive, the hospice nurses told me to keep talking to her. They said that hearing was the last thing to go and that she would hear me.

So I talked to her. I told her when I was going to get a shower, like I had done every morning, in case she needed me. I told her what was going on in the neighborhood. All the little things that I thought she would want to know.

One morning I sat at her bedside and said, “Tell me what heaven is like, okay?” Because she was going there. Maybe she’d have a brief stop in purgatory, but it would be very brief. My mother was going to heaven.

I just knew that Mom would let me know what heaven is like.

So far, I still don’t know.

I was with Mom when she took her last exhale. I knew she was gone and that her soul had left her body. I lay my head on her chest and cried. In that moment, I felt a sense of warmth on my back and shoulders, as if someone had placed a shawl over them. That was Mom saying to me that she was okay and she wanted me to be okay.

I haven’t felt or heard anything since. And it bothers me.

I keep waiting to hear from Mom because my dad reached through to me after he died in 1998. I remember two instances that were very powerful.

The first was on the Saturday morning after his funeral in October. Jimmy and I had returned to Virginia and had gotten up early to go striper fishing. We were on the boat and had just come out of Lynnhaven Inlet. Jimmy opened it up as we headed into the Chesapeake Bay. The sun was just coming up over my right shoulder. I looked back at it and I heard my dad say clearly, “How do?” It was his verbal shorthand for, “How are you doing?” It was his voice and he was there. I remember telling him that I was good. I smiled, knowing that he was with me that morning.

The second time was several weeks later. I was in the kitchen, and I had some CDs on shuffle. Don’t Worry Baby by The Beach Boys came on, and I felt a rush of warmth. When I was a kid, Dad would play his Beach Boys albums on a record player. The feeling I had there in the kitchen was more than a nice memory evoked by a song. It was a connection unlike any I had ever felt. He was near. And he was okay.

I keep thinking about why Dad reached through to me and Mom hasn’t. I don’t have any answers, just a hunch. I was living 350 miles away from my dad when he died. For many years before that, I was living even further away, and our relationship suffered during my first marriage. Dad and I grew closer again as I went through my divorce. He had met Jimmy only once—two months before he died—and they were friends instantly.

So much was left unsaid between Dad and me. I had squandered twelve years of our relationship, and we had begun to forge a new connection that was going to be wonderful. Then he was gone. Maybe he came through to me because of the lost opportunities and the “I love yous” that would never be said.

It was completely different with Mom. Very little was left unsaid. I learned from losing Dad that you should never miss an opportunity to say, “I love you.” Whenever Mom and I talked all those years over the phone, we ended every conversation with, “I love you.”

Once I became her caregiver, we said goodnight by holding each other’s hands and saying, “I love you.” We spent the last two and a half years of her life together in this home. We talked about nonsense, about things that were important to us, about good and bad memories, about our frustrations, about everything. There were very few lost opportunities. I give us both credit for making sure of that.

Maybe that’s why she hasn’t reached through. Because we knew each other’s hearts, and through all the sadness of her last days on earth, we knew we were both going to be okay.

Asking to know what heaven is like is a lot to put on someone. I may never get that answer. I’ll just have to live in a way that I can hopefully find out myself someday. Until then, I will be listening for her. In the stillness. In the sunrise. Everywhere.